Shaping Tomorrow’s Justice: Dr. James Austin on Trends and Data-Driven Solutions

Join us for a thought-provoking episode of the 360 Justice Podcast, where host Gary Mohr sits down with Dr. James Austin, a leading expert in correctional planning and research. Over the course of his 45-year career, Dr. Austin has profoundly influenced criminal justice operations, from his early days at Joliet and Statesville prisons in Illinois to founding the JFA Institute, which focuses on providing data-driven research and solutions to enhance the effectiveness and fairness of criminal justice systems.

In this episode, Dr. Austin delves into the importance of data-driven results in the justice system, shedding light on critical topics such as the evolution of classification systems, trends in crime and arrests, and the future of population management. Discover how his pioneering work has shaped the field and gain valuable insights into creating safer, more effective justice facilities. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the foremost authorities in criminology as he answers pressing questions and offers solutions for the justice community.

Transcript

Gary Mohr: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the CGL 360 justice podcast. I'm your host today, Gary Mohr. I'm a senior fellow with CGL and we're looking forward to speaking with today's guest, Dr. James Austin, and I can tell you he is a true leader in our profession. Dr. Austin has 45 years correctional experience planning and doing research in our profession, began his career in Illinois, working both at Statesville and Joliet, was executive vice president for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

He founded the Institute on Justice and Corrections at George Washington University, and then started the JFA Institute, and we'll talk a little more about that as we go through. He's an author of multiple publications. He's a 1991 recipient of the American Correctional Association's highest research award, the Peter P. Legions Award. And the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology for Outstanding Contribution to our Profession. He has a BA in Sociology from Wheaton College in Illinois, Masters of Art from DePaul in Chicago, and a PhD from the University of California at Davis. Let me just tell you, that is a very brief overview, yet impressive description of Dr. Austin's background, but from my personal experience in 50 years in this work, I know of no one else that has had the impact on more correctional systems in our country than Dr. Austin. 

Dr. James Austin: Thank you very much. Appreciate that introduction. 

Gary Mohr: Listen, Jim, why don't you explain how you started in corrections and what led you to your work as the leading criminologist in our profession. 

Dr. James Austin: Thanks, Gary. Yeah. As you mentioned, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in Wheaton College, which is a small liberal arts college in Chicago.

And I was looking for a job, oddly enough, in the criminal justice system. Anthis is kind of an interesting story because it tells you the way things were back then. I got interested because in our senior year, we did a field trip to Statesville. And I'd never been to a prison before in my life.

And they took us on the tour, the Statefield Penitentiary, what it was called back then. And what struck me from the get was how normal it was, especially the staff and the prisoners that they were walking about, they were talking, you know, it wasn't some kind of crazy place where a lot of violence was going on.

It was just kind of an interesting, as they used to say, society of captives, that existed back then. So, I needed a job. I'm out of college. I applied for three jobs. One was with the Cook County probation department. The other was the DuPage County Probation department, and the 3rd was the Illinois Department of corrections.

Now, as your listeners may know, Cook County is heavily Democratic. But they may not know that DuPage County is heavily Republican. So I was given job offers for both Cook County and DuPage with one requirement. In the Democratic job, I had to vote Democratic in the election. To take the job, I had to say, I was going to do that.

And in DuPage County, same thing. They said I had to vote Republican to get the job. Illinois Department of Corrections did not make that requirement. So I took that job. So that's how I got started in Illinois Department of Corrections. 

Gary Mohr: My guess too Jim is that they would have checked your voting records if you would have gone to those 2 probation departments. 

Dr. James Austin: Yeah, they have a way of knowing that, I think.

Gary Mohr: I think so too. Explain the history and development of the JFA Institute. And what its focus and mission is. 

Dr. James Austin: Okay, so that's another kind of long story. I worked in Illinois Department of Corrections for about five years, got my master's degree, and quite frankly, I have to say I was bored with the routine of a prison operation. It was not stimulating to me. I had done a research project on the parole board as part of my master's thesis. So that kind of was what I wanted to do. I wanted to study the system. So, I left Illinois with $10,000 in my pocket and moved to San Francisco, put my resume on the street, and I got a call to work for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, which was located in Davis, California. Don Gofferson was the former director there. 

So, I did that for about 20 years, moved up the ranks and became the executive vice president, and then decided I wanted to leave NCCD. I got a job offer from George Washington University, which I took, and I did that for a few years. But at that point, I was tired of working for some other entity with all the administrative bureaucratic stuff. So, I wanted to do my own thing. And I had at that point, I guess, developed a reputation where people really didn't care where I work. They just wanted to hire me. And so, the JFA Institute became my little research organization and gave me the freedom that I wanted in terms of pursuing projects that I wanted to do at a reasonable price to my clients.

Gary Mohr: You know, Jim, I recall earlier on in my career in the 80s an objective classification system was something that most systems failed to have but recognized its importance. And my recollection of Dr. James Austin was that, as Dr. Sider came to Ohio and we started to look at corrections, beyond the 1950s, we started looking at the science of our work and that was my first recollection of Dr. James Austin was that whole concept of objective classification and how it's kind of the engine of a correctional system, I think.

Dr. James Austin: Yeah, I kind of made a reputation first in classification. And that goes back to my work in Illinois. One of my jobs there for a period of time was working at the reception center. They called it the reception center. And, back then we only had five facilities. And classification was basically if you were young and from Cook County, you went to Statesfield. If you're older, middle of the state, you go to Joliet. If you're a gang guy and young, you go to Pontiac. And if you're south of Springfield, Illinois, you go to Menard. And that's what classification was. So, I had the experience of going through some prison disturbances in Statesville and in Joliet, and I was gaining my research background and was studying risk assessment, so I was learning how do you construct an assessment tool? At that time, back in 1980, in fact, the only state that had a somewhat objective classification system was state of California and a guy named Norm Holt put that together who I became very good friends over the years.

So, I knew something about risk assessment. I knew something about how prisons operate. And I develop this philosophy of having the initial and the reclassification instrument. And, making sure that it was based on objective scoring criteria, because at that time states were being sued on their classification procedures that it was not objective. It was subjective or bias and therefore, it lacked due process in particular. And also, they were overclassifying people. A lot of people would be put into the higher security settings that didn't need to be there. 

Gary Mohr: Well, it just goes to show your history and the amount of systems you've touched.

Jim, you recently decided to merge JFA with CGL. How do you sense that that merger will benefit your current and future clients. And then how will that move enhance the services of CGL do you think? 

Dr. James Austin: Well, CGL and I have, we've worked together for a number of years on projects. So, let's say we were dating for a long time and Eli decided he wanted to marry me, I guess. So, so I accepted.

So, you have to look at your life, you know, it has a start date and an end date. And I wanted to take the knowledge base and skills that I think JFA has developed and put it someplace where it could go on without me being there. So, for me, this is a transition. I want to work with the very talented staff. I mean, CGL is probably the premier organization now in the country when it comes to correctional planning.

 I really don't know of any other organization that has the practical and technical experiences CGL has and I know people like you, who I respect a great deal, so I felt comfortable transferring this technology base to CGL. 

Gary Mohr: Well, we're certainly very fortunate to have you Jim and I mean that.

 I want to talk a little bit about population projections. We have gone through covid, at least one strain of it. I don't know what's going to happen next. And all of these variables that seem to really challenge our ability to think about who we're going to have in our systems. But, as a leading expert in population projections, what do you see as the current trends in crime, arrest, and criminal justice litigation as well as reform? So what do you see coming? 

Dr. James Austin: So that should take about an hour to do. 

Gary Mohr: Not enough time in this podcast, but we'll get a little snippet of it.

Dr. James Austin: Let's, let's start with crime. Okay. This is actually one of the projects I've just completed, we're working with some fellow criminologists. We developed a methodology for rejecting crime rates. And the reason we did this. If you look at crime rates, historically, they were pretty steady since 1930, when they first started measuring the crime rates.

Up until about the mid 1960s, it was just like a steady rate, homicide rate; everything was not moving. Then in the mid 1960s, it took off and then it, it peaked about 1985, and then beginning about 1995, it started going down. So I call this the big miss for criminologists. They didn't see this coming.

No one projected either the increase, nor did they see the big decline that has happened since 1995. Without getting into the weeds too much, we've looked at these macro level things and two of the big reasons why it went up and it went down is the fertility rates. Oddly enough, women having children at a certain rate, and if you lag that about 15 to 20 years, you'll see an uptick or downturn in crime rates. The other is inflation. The very strong correlation between inflation and crime rates. So, if you look at that big uptick what you see is this big rush of males hitting the ages of 15 to 24. And you also see inflation going up and inflation stays pretty high.

And then it starts coming down. The birth rate starts declining and you lag it again, 15 to 20 years. And that explains the decline. So it's gone down. And in fact, what's interesting now. With COVID, COVID was a big shock and we call it an external shock to the system. There was an uptick, not a huge uptick, but there was an uptick in crime rates, 2021-22.

But in 23’, it's dropped. And the first quarter of this year, it's dropped again. So it's kind of back to where it was. So long story short, Gary. We don't see crime rates going up or down. They're going to stay pretty much the same as long as inflation and the birth rates don't move very much at all. There's another interesting statistic. I got to mention this, which is, immigration, with the birth rate dropping below to the U. S. Native population is dropping and it's projected to drop about 100,000,000 people over the next 50-60 years. 

And the only way that the U. S. population stays level is migration. And despite the new stories you hear, criminologists have discovered this quite a bit. It's repeated in many studies. Immigrants, both illegal and legal, have low crime rates compared to native born Americans. So if you have more immigration, it actually drops your crime rate. As a nation, as a whole. So that's crime. Arrests have plummeted. Arrests hit a peak of about 13 to 14 million a year and now they've dropped to under 6 million. 

Gary Mohr: Oh, wow. 

Dr. James Austin: Yes. Huge drop in the arrest numbers. In part because of the crime, but we had this big COVID shock and when COVID came in, police stopped arresting people for low level kinds of behaviors. There is a rebound that's going on now and the arrests are starting to come back up.

But again, they're going to stay pretty flat now. So, both crime and arrest, which feeds the system we project to be fairly stable over the next 5 to 10 years, absent some external shock to the system. 

Gary Mohr: You know, this last segment, the last response emphasizes the importance of these podcasts.

 If we're in the public and we listen to media, we don't get that factual research-based response and rationale to crime and arrest and populations. And that's why these podcasts are so important. We just have to emphasize and spread the word, I think, because that's not what we hear as we turn on the 6 o'clock news. 

Dr. James Austin: It's interesting. One of my studies I had to do at PhD was a study of television news. And one of the things you learn very quickly, every broadcast is going to have a crime story. So, we can have a big drop in crime, but the perception to the viewer is that crime is not going down, maybe even going up, you know, so that's the reality and I don't blame the public. The public doesn't have the time to look at the FBI website and study it, but I think there's some responsibility that needs to be assumed by the media to do a more accurate presentation of what these mega trends are. 

Gary Mohr: And I would guess that that in some way influences political platforms and campaigns and then further legislation, et cetera.

But that's a great explanation. I'm so happy I'm the host here, Jim, because I'm learning a lot as well. How do you see these current trends then impacting the size and characteristics of our correctional system from probation, parole, jails, and prisons? How these trends, do you think, how's that going to make those systems work?

Dr. James Austin: Well, things have stabilized. So, we, we did have, if you look at the correctional system, it began declining about the mid 2005 or so. It takes a while for the correctional system to respond to changes in crime rates and, and arrest largely because, except for the pretrial population in jails, because most of the correctional system is dealing with people that are sentenced.

And so, you can have drops in certain kinds of crimes, but it doesn't really affect the more serious crimes that keep on occurring. Long story short. I'll do them one by one. The jail population dropped the most because of the arrest dropping, but it has rebounded and has actually increased last year, probably going to stay pretty much where it's at.

On the prison side. Same thing. There have been reforms that have occurred that had tremendous declines in the prison populations. California, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, those systems had purposeful changes. Ohio had purposeful changes that were designed to reduce the population and what they were focusing on was changing the length of stay.

You'll recall, when we started, just about every state was in an indeterminate sentencing structure. And then we had the change to determinate sentencing. We had federal government funding states if they would adopt truth and sentencing for violent offenses, we had parole boards getting more conservative in their grant rate. So bottom line, the average length of stay went up about 33%. 

Gary Mohr: Wow. 

Dr. James Austin: And then we have these phenomena of people that are getting sentences for life without the possibility of parole. So now we have a large enough people that have to die in prison. So, because that length of stay is in there, unless you go in and unpack some of those laws, the prison population is going to stay pretty much where it's at. Same thing with probation, and also, the parole systems.

Gary Mohr: Well, you know, you know, I'm an old correctional director and I still spend a lot of time with correctional leaders around the country. And I think there is a strong belief and interest in restorative environments and trying to, to present programs that make a difference in people's lives to reduce crime and future crime victims.

But I continue to see the challenge of these leaders trying to put those in place in facilities that were built decades ago for a different purpose. And I know that we hadn't really intended to get into this, but I'm really interested in your thought about how, if you were a correctional leader, how do you go about creating a more restorative environment, a more program, rich environment in facilities that were built decades ago? Have you had some experience or seen opportunities where this has worked? 

Dr. James Austin: Yeah, I think, you know, obviously the solution is a new facility that provides program space. That's what's lacking in almost all these older facilities, there's no program space. So, there's two things that systems are doing. One is the big revolution is the tablet. The tablet can actually bring the program to the person on their tablet. So that's a big innovation that I think states should focus on. The other is, I have seen increasingly this trend and this is like an internal classification where they start creating housing units that are therapeutically oriented.

So, substance abuse, sex offenders, education, et cetera. And it's renovation work, they'll take some cells and transform them into interview rooms they'll carve out on the outside recreation areas that they didn't have before so people can have structured recreation. And then on the staffing side, and this is something we definitely need to talk about, on the staffing side, you start developing staff that buy into this, not only because you're hopeful that it has a long term impact on people's recidivism when they get released, but the more immediate benefit is a safer prison for staff and prisoners alike. There's no question. And forget the recidivism, if you don't believe in that. But these kinds of program-based facilities are safer.

Gary Mohr: I know we hadn't planned on talking about this, but, when I was director, I asked, and we had a great research staff in Ohio, Ohio is so blessed to have them, and I said, can we look at our prisons, our medium security prisons, our close security prisons. Is there a way to look at whether a particular prison is working better at reducing violence and reducing future crime, reducing recidivism. So, our staff said, you know, it was probably crazy, but they launched this thing and said, okay, we'll just look at people that spend 70 percent of their time at this site, et cetera. But what we found Jim was that there was one prison in every cut came out the best at reducing recidivism. And it happened to be a prison around Lime, Ohio, that had the most specialty units. So you just talked about specialty units. And a therapeutic drug unit had a therapeutic, residential mental health unit.

And I think the programming was good, but as I made my rounds, I found the staff wrapped themselves around the mission of that unit. And as I recall, it honestly it had the highest staff retention rate as well. It felt part of something. Yeah. And, I just wanted to touch on that. I'm so happy you brought that up because I'm a believer in those kinds of specialty units and in the value, particularly now as staff vacancies are just a challenge everywhere. 

Dr. James Austin: Yeah, I was just going to say that. I mean, that's, that's probably the number 1 challenge to the industry is staff shortages. Which are significant. It makes it very difficult if not impossible to do what you just described because you need to have first of all staff that are not turning over, but also you need staff to escort people to programs and make sure the activities are being carried out.

 That's one of the biggest problems we have, you know, we have scheduled activities. Oh, we can't do it today because we're short of staff. 

Gary Mohr: And that causes all kind of internal pressure among the population and, conflict among staff and the population and we've worked in quite a profession, I think, over our time. So, and we touched on the classification system before, but based on your experience, why is having a validated classification system so critical to safe operations of our prisons today? 

Dr. James Austin: Well, the central thing about a good objective classification system is that it is not a prediction model. It is an incentive based system. So, the reason that I tried to design it the way it was, it focused more on that reclassification component. When people come in, there's an initial classification assessment. It's like taking the test before you get to college. That is supposed to be predictive of how well you'll do in college.

But once you get admitted to college, the college does not care about your SAT scores. They want to see your grades. And so that's the same thing. That's what the reclassification system is. It's the grades. And if you want to get to a lower custody level in a relatively short period of time or stay, well, you have more privileges, more access, the programs, a safer environment, then you have to behave.

And that's what that reclassification system does. So it's, it's designed to reward positive behavior. That's why it's important that the prisoner understand the system. A big, big component of the prisoners understanding the classification system, better than the staff sometimes, because, I want them to manipulate the system and behave the way I want them to. So that's why that's important. 

Now. Prior to objective classification systems, most of our prisoners were assigned to maximum security environments. Luckily, when the big prison boom started in the 1980s, when I started in Illinois, it was 7,000 people.

By the time the boom was over, it was up to 45,000. They had no idea what kinds of facilities to build and so the classification systems came on just in time to show that most of the inmates were medium and minimum custody inmates and only about 20, 25 percent would be in that maximum group. So it had a profound impact on construction in the 1980s and 90s, and even today. 

Gary Mohr: And it's certainly a lot less expensive to build a lighter security prison as well. And I remember in the 80s, the increased events was such a demand. That cost was an influence and factor and had we not had classification systems that we had, I think there would have been a tendency for people to think, oh, we're going to get the worst of the worst and we're going to do all of these things.

So, it really helped. I think a more academic view of how to spend billions of dollars building prisons. So, finally, what significant issues and trends do you see evolving in the area of population management or in the next 10 years, or really our profession in the next 10 years? 

Dr. James Austin: Well, it looks like right now the system's going to be relatively stable.

Now, if you look at the infrastructure of the system, we have a lot of aging facilities and states and counties are going to have make decisions about what facilities can they renovate, retrofit and continue to use and then those I need to tear down. Certainly the most interesting populations that are getting the greatest attention are what we call the restricted housing populations, so, and then I'll separate those into two groups. One will be the people that are the most assaultive, violent person and then we have people that are severely mentally ill. So, these populations require special programs, special housing units that meet a lot of the mandates brought about by litigation.

So out of cell time. Typically in a restrictive housing unit, they have to be coming out of their cells at least four hours a day. New York requires them to come out seven hours a day. And so this is pretty stressful because these are people that have assaulted staff and inmates and it requires specialized housing units on the mental health side.

Same thing. You know, you need to have units that are safe, but also have program space so they can go to space for their one on one. So those special housing units are the ones that are in my work. That's what I'm getting. Most of my work now is a state's getting sued or county being sued on its treatment of people in restrictive housing.

 I also think the new construction work is going to be replacement of aging facilities and constructing facilities that are technologically smarter than what we have now, the cameras, body scanning, all that stuff will be improved in these new high tech facilities.

Gary Mohr: As I was thinking, Jim, about our discussion today and, quite frankly was very honored to be able to, to have a conversation with you, I thought about the value that you bring to looking at population management trends, classification to looking at how to operate and manage those populations and CGL work at doing some master planning and look at those kind of facilities that really should be raised and taken out and built new, but not all systems, not all facilities that have had excessive deferred maintenance can just be replaced because of budgets and it seems to me that the partnership and the experience that you bring and CGL brings to a potential agency to look at those kinds of facilities that can be salvaged and restored in a certain way aligned with the vision.

And those that need to be taken out of service and built new because agencies just don't have the resources to do everything they really should do and prioritizing that seems to me to be a great partnership between your experience and what CGL brings to systems. I think. 

Dr. James Austin: One thing as you're talking, I want to get back to the staffing issue. I don't think we're going to be able to recruit and retain sufficient people to support the current prison and jail populations. That's the bad news. The good news, if a jurisdiction is willing to do this, is that their populations can be safely lowered by just doing a few common sense changes that affect the length of stay and doing risk assessment properly. When I get engaged with a jurisdiction, I'll say, you know, I can show you how to take this population down safely to the level it needs to go to, given the staff you do have today. So you would have a staff person on the floor during the day and evening shifts, you do have enough staff to escort people to programs and visitation and stuff like that.

So that to me, it's the next challenge. And I say this because there's just so much research on this length of stay issue. It's my pet peeve. The average length of stay in the nation's prison system was about 22, 23 months. Now it's about 35, 36 months. We could go back to the 22.

But we'd have to change some existing laws and you'd have to make them retroactive, but it certainly can be done. And I think, as the staffing shortage does not get solved, states are going to have to do that. I mean, we just have too many examples of states that have successfully lowered their prison populations significantly and did not see any impact on either their recidivism rates or their crime rates.

Gary Mohr: You know, in one of the, the most successful programs that we were able to implement in Ohio, was the ability for the director, within the last six months, to place a person in the community correctional setting, and then eventually even a home placement. As opposed to spending their last six months in prison, and we were able to do that with 2 or 3000 people a year.

And it had the most success in terms of the recidivism rate of any program I did, and we really didn't do anything except move them through the system a little earlier. 

Dr. James Austin: There's a lot of research on recidivism rates by length of stay controlling for the background and all these studies show it doesn't affect these peoples recidivism rates if they get released at 18 months versus 24 months versus 36 months. But it has a huge impact on the budget because that's part of the equation, that's driving the, the population up. The other thing, going back to the programs though, and going back to the analogy of the SATs and an incentive-based system, if we could go back to a system where a person is sentenced to prison is told if you do A, B and C, you'll be released. This time period. And it's not you may be released or you may not be released. It's just like, you did four years of college kind of graduate. Well, maybe it depends. It depends what the faculty thinks, you know they decide to release you from school or not, you may have to stay another year or two, so that's what we need to get back to because that's human behavior, humans do respond to incentives, and they get rewarded for stuff they will act more appropriate.

Gary Mohr: That principle may also apply to the challenge that many systems are having with restrictive housing that, too often, there is a time period ascribed. For certain behavior, be it a year, 6 months or whatever, without any deference to what the person is doing in terms of taking some cognitive programming successfully compared to those that don't.

And I, I think that our last changes in restrictive housing standards by the American Correctional Association really promoted this kind of a diverse treatment team, case plan and monitoring and moving people based on the progress, as opposed to just sheer time periods that many systems. So interesting.

So as systems out there listening to this, Jim, for years and decades upon decades, we've talked about prison capacity and jail capacity being number beds. Right? And now the reality is that we need to factor in our ability to staff as a capacity determiner as well, so I think that's, I think it's important to at least acknowledge and talk about that. And I think systems are saying that, but I think sometimes systems could use a little bolstering politically. Regarding that as well. 

Dr. James Austin: Well, on the out of cell time, you know, you have to have sufficient staff to get people out of their cell for showers, structured recreation.

And in this world of litigation, you say, okay, yeah, I think people should be getting out at least 7 hours a day or 10 hours a day. But if you don't have the staff to do it, you can't do it. You know, it's just impossible. Yeah. And it's not safe to let them out unsupervised. So, the rubber hits the road here at some point where like, we're not allowed to get on a plane if it was just a pilot and one flight attendant.

Now they can fly that plane, but if you keep doing that, that thing's going to crash at some point, or you're going to have an episode that's not positive. And that's what we're doing. We're flying these institutions with just one pilot and just one flight attendant. We're supposed to have a copilot and supposed to have 3 or 4 flight attendants in there.

Gary Mohr: Well, Jim, you've exhausted the questions that I have. Do you have any final comments that you'd like to provide to the audience today? 

Dr. James Austin: Well, there's one thing I, and you mentioned you were blessed at Ohio, because I'm familiar with it and had a very good probably still do have a good research department.

One of my laments is what I would call the, I won't call it the decimation, but big reductions in research capabilities in departments of corrections. There was a time when they weren't just doing what I call bean counting, like, here's the annual report, and a list of 20 tables and charts, but they were experimenting, they were trying new things and, I think one of the things that I want the field to start thinking about is experimenting with new approaches. You mentioned your facility, the one facility that had its own personality, I guess. Now the question is, can you replicate that?

 Was that a charismatic warden or something or what, what was going on there? But if it's something that works, then that's something that the field needs to try and replicate because obviously it was successful. There was a recent study that came out, I’m not going to mention it, but it was saying here's a new approach and had a reduction in violence. Well, the numbers are so small, I'm familiar with it because it's, I'm located near it, it's really something that's not that strong and you can't really replicate it. So we need to start experimenting with different designs. Architectural designs, but also management strategies. Training technology, things like that. I think experimentation is something that the field needs and I would encourage listeners to reach out to CGL because we'd be more than happy, especially now that I'm with you guys to do some studies along these lines to see what works.

Gary Mohr: Well, Dr. Austin, let me just thank you for a great breadth of information you've provided here today. I believe in our correctional leaders of today, I believe that there is a strong commitment to do what they can to reduce future crime and to make the places that they operate safe. And as Dr Austin just suggested, CGL now with the partnership of Jim Austin, is a place that you can contact to talk about those kinds of things that you believe might work and we certainly would be most interested in partnering with you to create a greater environment. This is a great profession, and I think CGL is going to have a great benefit with having Dr. Austin with us. So I'd like to thank Dr Austin for all of his comments today and for everyone who listened in and I think we're all in a better place from listening to Dr Austin.

So, thank you for listening to our podcast today. You can find this and other episodes on a standard podcast platforms, apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and Spotify. Or visit us at CGLcompanies.com/podcast. If you have suggestions for topics you want covered this season or if you're interested in being a future guest on the 360 justice podcast, email us at podcast@cglcompanies.com.